April 17, 2014

LIBERTARIANS VS LINCOLN:

In his column earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens laid out his case against Rand Paul becoming the GOP's presidential nominee. It was a powerful indictment and perhaps one worth building on.

Mr. Stephens highlighted what he believes would be some of the obstacles facing Senator Paul, beginning with his long political association with Jack Hunter, alias the "Southern Avenger," who among other things wrote an April 13, 2004 column titled "John Wilkes Booth Was Right."

The "Southern Avenger" said this:

Although Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth's heart was in the right place, the Southern Avenger does regret that Lincoln's murder automatically turned him into a martyr. American heroes like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee have been unfairly attacked in recent years, but Abraham Lincoln is still regarded as a saint. Well, he wasn't it - far from it. In fact, not only was Abraham Lincoln the worst President, but one of the worst figures in American history... The fact that April 15th is both the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination and tax day makes perfect sense. We might not even have had a federal income tax if it weren't for him. And I imagine somewhere in hell Abe Lincoln is probably having the last laugh.

Here is Jack Hunter, writing in his own name, declaring in 2009 that "Hitler was an admirer of the 16th president for all the obvious reasons." (The adjective "obvious" is such a nice touch.) Later that year, again in a column bearing Hunter's name, we read this:

In 1999, I already thought Americans were too different: "America is becoming more diverse and multicultural which means the multiplicity of ideas and values will increase. Only states' rights, the heart of the Confederate cause, can meet this challenge."

If divorce is considered preferable to a marriage that can't be fixed, might not divorce also be preferable to a political union that has failed as well? The Jeffersonian, decentralist philosophy and all-American radicalism I embraced fully in my youth makes even more sense today [2009] than in 1999. Whether revisiting states' rights or going the route of full-blown secession, it would be far more logical to allow the many, very different parts of this country to pursue their own visions than to keep pretending we are all looking through the same lens. And looking back on my own past, I am reminded that any future South worth avenging would do well to revisit its own radical heritage -- so that the principles of limited government might rise again.

Chris Haire, Hunter's former editor at the Charleston City Paper, wrote this:

While a member of the City Paper's stable of freelancers, Jack wrote in support of racially profiling Hispanics, praised white supremacist Sam Francis, blasted the House of Representative's apology for slavery, claimed that black people should apologize to white people for high crime rates, defended former Atlanta Braves pitcher and racist John Rocker and Charleston County School District board member Nancy Cook after she said some mothers should be sterilized, argued that Islam was an innately dangerous threat to the U.S, professed that he would have voted for a member a British neo-Nazi political party if he could have, considered endorsing former Council of Conservative Citizens member Buddy Witherspoon in his bid to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham, compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler and Ike Turner, and continued to profess the erroneous claim that the primary cause of the Civil War was not the fight over slavery, ignoring the decades of American history leading up to war and South Carolina's very own Declaration of the Immediate Causes for Secession, which clearly note that protecting slavery was the preeminent motivation of state leaders.

People are free to judge these columns individually, but there does seem to be a disturbing pattern here, no? Remember this, too: All of this was in the public domain before Hunter joined Senator Paul's staff. So how exactly does such a thing happen?

Mr. Hunter-who was also the former chairman of the Charleston, South Carolina chapter of the League of the South, a secessionist group-was Senator Paul's social media director, a person whose foreign-policy views Paul reportedly sought out, and the self-described co-author of Mr. Paul's 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington. He was also the official blogger for Representative Ron Paul's 2012 presidential campaign.